ICT in the PYP Reflections @#IBAPADL

January 18th-20th 2012-Prince Alfred College, Adelaide Australia

• 20 Participants
• 12 sessions
• 3 days of learning

Fun, tiring, challenging…that’s how I can describe my experience as a PYP workshop Leader in Adelaide co leading the ICT in the PYP with @jennysfen. First of all, I was very honored to be chosen to lead this workshop, and Jennifer Fenton from CDISHK was a great teacher to work with. She is such a professional and very knowledgeable. I learned a lot creating this workshop and working with her.

The first day was all about 21st century learning and international mindedness. What does it mean to be an internationally minded 21st century learner?. International mindedness is such a hard thing to define. It goes beyond just merely understanding different cultures. ICT enables us to transcend cultures and communities to connect, share and collaborate on a level unlike before. We spent the afternoon investigating and developing  conceptual understandings through with ICT in mind.

On day 2 we inquired into what collaboration means and what role ICT can play in such collaboration. For me, Twitter is an invaluable form of PD. Just being able to connect quickly to my ‘tribe’ (thanks @intrepidteacher) has been a powerful learning experience for me. We inquired into how to create a collaborative learning environment for our learners and communities and what this collaboration might look like. Kim Cofino was our guest speaker who skyped in from Japan and as always she was an inspiration to everyone. We looked at her Collaboration Cycle, I use this in my own school with teachers and can highly recommend Kim’s cycle. It just makes sense. Kim was great, and open to questions from the floor. Thanks @mscofino for taking time out of your busy day to enrich our learning. Later in the day was followed by a creation of an ICT Policy Framework. We discovered that no policies are the same and used James Wright’s 8 Domains of an ICT Policy  to  evaluate our current ICT policies and frameworks in our own schools. Many participants were at different levels of understanding regarding such policies but one thing we came away with is that ICT Policies need to be a collaborative effort, not the just the job of the’ IT guy/gal’ to create and mandate. ISTE NETS provides excellent standards to guide your school’s ICT policy.

Day 3 was devoted to personal inquiries that were used as a jump off point to a personal action plan. To be honest Ive used action plans in the past and these have worked well to some degree. We need to take charge of our own learning, however its all about TIME. So you make these action plans and they get tucked away and grow mushrooms. Our  challenge to participants was to make 2-4   SMART goals in the action plans, but what I see lacking here is a sound way to actually keep going back to it, reflecting, re-evaluating and taking action. This is something I am challenged by and will think about deeper if I run this workshop again next time.

In all it was such a great learning experience to share with other teachers. I came away with many ideas to use in my school, met some great educators that I can continue to learn from thanks to using technology as a means of collaboration. I would definitely run this workshop again, and gladly work with Jen again!  Thanks to all at #ibapadl for a great learning experience.